A video taken from the screen of a Ukrainian drone shows four missiles striking a column of more than a dozen Russian military vehicles parked at the side of the road near the village of Oktyabrskoye in the Rylsky district of the Kursk region.
The drone was being operated by the Khorne Group, part of Ukraine’s 116th Separate Mechanized Brigade. The footage, overdubbed with heavy metal music, was posted on social media.
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Pro-Russian milbloggers “Military Informant” suggested that Ukrainian forces had used M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) rockets to carry out the attack. As Kyiv Post has reported, although there has been no confirmation that HIMARS was used, the blogger posted an image that showed debris from an M101 submunition container from the HIMARS M30 rocket.
However, the video published by Khorne seemed to show large explosions more typical of unitary warheads rather than those linked to cluster munitions. After the first missile strikes, troops appear to leap from vehicles. After a pause, three more missiles strike the area around the static convoy.
Geolocated Images and video that were posted on Telegram early on Friday morning showed the burnt-out wreckage of at least 14 vehicles and bodies lying at the side of the road. They confirmed that the incident had occurred on the approach to the village of Oktyabrskoye, which is almost 30 kilometers (20 miles) from the Ukrainian border.
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Several social media sites suggest that the Khorne video only covered part of the attack and that more missiles, perhaps as many as 12, were involved. Although the damage shown was extensive, it doesn’t seem to support such a large strike,
It has been suggested that as many as 500 Russian troops were killed or injured during the attack in what was one of the largest single losses for the Russian army since the start of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Pro-Russian military so-called “Z-bloggers” were outraged by the incident, with some criticizing Russia’s senior commanders and calling for whoever authorized the movement of the column at risk of attack to be punished.
Valery Gerasimov, Russia’s Chief of the General Staff since 2012, had previously assured Russian President Vladimir Putin during a televised meeting on Aug. 8 that Russian forces had halted the Ukrainian advance in the Kursk region despite all the evidence to the contrary.
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